RAID
Discover the pros of having your sites and applications hosted on a RAID-enabled server.
RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard disks which function together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into individual ones via virtualization software. In any case, identical info is kept on all drives and the key advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.
-
RAID in Shared Hosting
All content which you upload to your new
shared hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning efficiently until the faulty drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.
-
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites in a
semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is copied to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to another one immediately without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of every single file.
-
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The physical servers where we make
virtual private server use high-speed NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites significantly. The drives work in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the site content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you use our backup service, your information will be saved on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your site content all of the time. With this type of setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of drives.